On the naturalness of stop consonant voicing

Abstract

A long recognized problem for linguistic theory has been to explain why certain sounds, sound oppositions, and sound sequences are statistically preferred over others among languages of the world. The formal theory of markedness, developed by Trubetzkoy and Jakobson in the early 1930's, and extended by Chomsky and Halle (1968), represents an attempt to deal with this problem. It is at least implicit in that theory that sounds are rare when (and because) they are marked, and common when (and because) they are not. Whether sounds are marked or unmarked depends – in the latter version of the theory, particularly – upon the ‘intrinsic content’ of acoustic and articulatory features which define them. There was, however, no substantive attempt among early proponents of the theory to show what it was about the content of particular features and feature combinations that caused them to be marked, and others not.

Evidence for a learning bias against saltatory phonological alternations

“…For example, many languages, such as German, do not allow voiced obstruents at the ends of words (where obstruents are sounds with a high degree of constriction in the oral tract, such as stops and fricatives). Such restrictions have a functional aerodynamic explanation because it is difficult to sustain the subglottal pressure necessary to maintain voicing in wordfinal obstruents (see Westbury & Keating, 1986;Kirchner, 1998, pp. 56-57).…”

Prosodic influences on consonant production in Dutch: Effects of prosodic boundaries, phrasal accent and lexical stress

“…This is because the closed air pathways during the stop closure cause P o to approach P s . Other active articulatory actions such as expansion of the vocal track wall and/or lowering of the larynx during the stop closure can, however, help to maintain the pressure difference (Ohala, 1983;Westbury, 1983;Westbury & Keating, 1986).…”

Geminate Inalterability and Lenition

“…This assumption is supported by the mass-spring model, which is able to achieve a geminate fricative only by opposing the positive force impulse with a substantial amount negative force: By comparison, under the mass-spring model, the geminate stop (and all the singleton consonants) require no such negative force, with the result that the geminate fricative emerges as more effortful than the geminate stop, or any of the singletons (compare (37) with (24) and (34) what is required to keep the vocal folds vibrating (roughly 2,000 dyne/cm 2 ), and voicing ceases, typically 60 msec into the closure for an alveolar stop (slightly earlier for a velar, and later for a labial) (Westbury and Keating 1986). Voicing can be extended during an oral stop by various cavity expansion gestures, e.g.…”